The Crave Diaries have been a little quite the last few months, in large part because we've been working away on the 2nd generation Duet. While we did rather extensive testing of the original, and initial feedback was incredible positive, a few months back we started to hear the sensation for some users was a bit too intense. After doing a little research and another round of more extensive testing, it appeared that for 10%-20% of our users, the Duet tips just weren't well suited for them. And while we know one size can never fit all, we felt we could do better, much better!

So it was back to design lab for some R&D and more sophisticated testing. We might do a more detailed post on our process in the future, but the short story is we build an expanded community of amazing product testers and through their feedback, got a pretty good understanding of why some users didn't love the Duet. It was a combination of the gap between the tips and the way the edges were treated. We thus tooled up 6 different designs - with a variety of gap distances and edge treatments - narrowed to 4 (shown below) and did several more rounds of testing...finally converging on two forms that women really liked. And because the Duet has two different sides, we were able to support one form on each side, allowing for a number of new options to explore sensation.

All Duets are now shipping with this new tip design, and for any customer who has one of the earlier models, we are offering a free upgrade to the new tips. Just our way of saying thank you for being an early supporter.

Initial reports from our testing and some early reviewers suggest that we have not only addressed the elements that some didn't like, we appear to have made it a much more desirable product for all users. Oh, and then 2nd generation Duet now has 25% more power, and on top of that a special "turbo" mode :)

A big thanks to all those who took the time to give us the feedback! We wouldn't have been able take the product to the next level without your help.

We are completely addicted to our Pinterest account! Several of us on the CRAVE staff are contributing daily and would, quite frankly, do it all day long if we could. Follow us to see what turns us on and what inspires us as well as hottest ideas for where to use our products!

To quote the late, great Steve Jobs "…you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." Prior to founding CRAVE, when I was designing underwater cameras and lights early in my career, it certainly never occurred to me that the esoteric expertise in underwater design would come in handy in making a truly waterproof pleasure object. While we realize that using the Duet 100 feet under the sea is not a likely scenario, rest assured, it should do just fine in your shower or bathtub. The little snippet above was shot on a recent trip to Lembeh Straight, Indonesia. While Crave keeps me rather busy, I do try to get out the office for a little underwater photography now and again. Learn more about the Duet here.

P.S. I risked life and limb for this shot. Indonesia currently has a serious ban on vibrators.

Hey there! We've ramped up our social media efforts lately. Our twitter feed often includes what our team is up to in the office and around town, peeks at our blog and facebook, and some super sexy eye candy from our Pinterest. We are always excited for another opportunity to chat with our friends and super thankful for all of the love and support so far... so follow us! Whether you're a tweetaholic or an occasional chirper, you can find us @followcrave.

Late last month, we had an awesome afternoon pulling together a day-time, lifestyle shoot with our gorgeous model, Claudia, to show off the Duet. About a week after that, we ran around town with Ti, CRAVE's Co-Founder for the nightime version. Everything was shot right here in San Francisco too!

Our team has been hard at work here at the CRAVE office and successfully shipped off the first batch of Memory Duets on April 4th. All of our CKIE backers should receive them in within the next week! For those of you lucky enough to have one en route, you might just want to do a mini-celebration dance when the package arrives and you get a glance at the the gleaming, gold-plated body inside. Whatever you’re inspired to do after that…

For those of you already enjoying your Duet, we'd love to hear what you think (knowing we're making people happy gives us that warm fuzzy feeling inside) -- leave a comment here, on Facebook, or drop us a line at hi@lovecrave.com.

"But wait, I haven't gotten my Duet!!" Don't panic -- if your vibe (memory or non-memory) isn't yet in your hands, or you haven't received an email saying that it's on its way, it just means we are missing one or more of the following:

Address

Payment for shipping

In the case of 16GB Luxes, confirmation of your custom engraving (even if you don't want anything engraved, please let us know)

Get in touch at hi@lovecrave.com so we can sort out the details and get your Duet to you as fast as possible!

OK...so we can actually see the finish line from here. We have a bunch of memory units build up and undergoing final testing. We are chasing a few very minor software bugs, but overall everything is working really well. After such a long journey to get here, we think it is worth taking an extra week or so of testing to make sure the product is truly ready for release. A big thank you to all the CKIE backers for their ongoing support and patience as we labored away to deliver of the vision we had for this product. You will of course be getting the first release (looks like later this week or next) and then we will start to fill the big list of pre-orders.

Finally have all parts in-house and we are ramping production for the 1st release of the memory Duets. The gold heads are coming together pretty well, but the memory boards have had a few more challenges in fabrication, but we think we have most of them taken care of. We also had to build a little pneumatic programmer machine so we can get the actual code onto the units.

We received nearly 50 entries from all over the world on this day. Thank you all for taking the time to send us a snap shot of your sky. The winning entry is from Sunnyvale, California - a clear and picturesque sky from their front yard with the beautiful cherry blossoms. Sometimes its about appreciating all the things you already have. :)

The best thing about this project is that everyone can enjoy it. We've created a collage of all the submissions and please feel free to download this and save it as a memento for VDay 2012. Thank you all for your contribution, and we hope you will enjoy all the great entries below. (Click on the thumbnail below to enlarge the image.)

Take a photo of the sky wherever you are on February 14 at anytime of day and submit it to us in one of three ways. You can upload in the comments below, tweet @followcrave (with #CraveVDay2012), or email us at hi@lovecrave.com (please include your city and country however you submit). We will create a collage of all the submissions for everyone to enjoy on Feb 15th! One lucky person will be selected to receive a 24 KT gold non-memory Duet! We’ll announce the winner on our blog post / Facebook / Twitter on February 15th!

Another batch of really great entries, that yet again made it a tough choice! The winning entry from "Mdinat" embraced a sexy geeky approach by spelling out "SEX" in binary. It took one our our math wizard interns to sort it out (we actually think she can read binary natively).

Speaking of numbers, we couldn't help but notice that the total number of blog comments for each contest was *69*. So what are the odds of that!

Have a peek at all the great entries here and a few great ones on twitter as well (#USBVibeEngraving).